The Senate’s Health Care Transparency Initiative recently asked stakeholders for feedback. In a brief series of posts, I’ll be sharing Freedman HealthCare’s recommendations to the group, which focused on strategies to maximize the opportunity of APCDs and alleviate barriers to the broad sharing of actionable health care data. Our first series of recommendations addresses expanding...Read more

Health care costs are rising and the American public knows it. As healthcare costs increase, so does the shift towards higher deductible health plans. Here’s the effect. Patients pay more out-of-pocket and now more than ever want to know how much their health care is going to cost. In response, a bipartisan group of Senators,...Read more

The Harvard Business Review recently published an article titled, “We Won’t Get Value-Based Health Care Until We Agree on What ‘Value’ Means.” The title begs a simple question, “Why do we have to agree?” Why can’t patients and the employers and health plans that foot much of their health care bills make individual and situational...Read more

I recently participated in the Digital Health @ Harvard series, which features speakers from Harvard as well as other collaborators and colleagues. The goal is to bring together those that work in the intersection between health and technology, a world the series has coined the “digital health ecosystem.” Discussion topics highlight new developments and identify opportunities...Read more

The numbers are in for 2018 health insurance exchange (HIX) enrollment. According to CMS, enrollment fell 3.7% to just under 11.8 million.  However, that total hides a big difference between the federal exchange and the state-operated exchanges.   HIX 2017 Enrollment 2018 Enrollment Change Federal Exchange/Healthcare.gov (34 states) 8,751,102 8,289,073 -5.3% State-run Exchanges (16 states...Read more

This week’s HCCI report again underscores the major driver of health costs in the US: provider prices. The late, great Uwe Reinhardt was right when he said “It’s the Prices, Stupid”. Here in Massachusetts, some of the most detailed work has been done on the topic, and it’s the same story. Back in 2010, the MA...Read more